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Perelandra Pays Our Debt


sub-light war is hell
times hell itself.
our veterans who made it back,
those few humanomorphs
of all the myriads sent,
blinked at a millennium
that ill-remembered war;
the young travelers were
stone chippers in metropolis,
lobe-fins on a mountaintop--
to assimilate they'd have to die--
we owed them more.

in the end a habitat reserve
was set aside,
for our returning heroes,
it revolved a few hundred kilometers
inside the Dyson sphere,
a matt-black moon.

time dilation left them ill-prepared
for our teratogenic society,
students visited them
in human guise,
and many theses wrote,
till one visitor, a tertiamorph,
fell in young with
a handsome virusiare first class,
she, 26 years young/28 kiloyears old,
could never see her lover's
natal form.

so now we thaw the banks of frozen oldsters,
a few each year,
send them in, sterile,
to keep things interesting,
and mumble thanks when its shadow comes,
to our black soldier moon.



end



I recognize my debt to our veterans. They need more than just this day.